Building Economic Resilience to Disasters in the Buffalo Niagara Region: Workshop Materials

On February 25-26, 2014, the NADO Research Foundation hosted a training workshop in Niagara Falls, New York that brought together about 25 city and county economic developers, elected officials, small business owners and development specialists, emergency managers, and other community leaders to learn about approaches to make businesses and the overall regional economy more resilient to natural disasters. Participants–all from the Buffalo-Niagara region of western New York, which has experienced frequent flooding in recent years–exchanged ideas with economic development leaders from other disaster-impacted communities, received training on business continuity planning, learned how to assess natural hazards in their area, and discussed how best to take advantage of disaster recovery and mitigation funding opportunities.

The workshop was co-sponsored by One Region Forward (http://www NULL.oneregionforward NULL.org/), the regional planning effort aimed at supporting more sustainable forms of development in Erie and Niagara counties and funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (http://portal NULL.hud NULL.gov/hudportal/HUD) (HUD). The NADO Research Foundation is providing capacity-building and technical assistance services to HUD and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (http://www NULL.epa NULL.gov) sustainable communities award recipients like One Region Forward through the National Sustainable Communities Learning Network (http://sclearningnetwork NULL.org/).

Additionally, this workshop was supported by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (http://www NULL.eda NULL.gov), which has funded the NADO Research Foundation to provide training and technical assistance on disaster recovery and economic resilience to regions and communities in the northeast and the southeast that were impacted by disasters during fiscal year 2011.

The workshop materials are included below. If you have any questions about this event, the materials, or NADO’s work on disaster and economic resilience more broadly, please contact Megan McConville at [email protected] (mmcconville null@null nado NULL.org).